Maryann Tan

Welcome! I’m Maryann, and I’m working to earn a PhD in the field of speech and cognitive science at Stockholm University. My project is aimed at figuring out how human listeners adapt to the different ways people speak. That sounds trivial, when you consider that we interact effortlessly with different accents every day. But when you dig into talkers’ acoustic patterns, you’ll realise it’s not an easy task at all – which is perhaps why we haven’t built machines that can match human performance although we have had some qualified success!

At the lab I work with, we have been trying to describe this adaptive ability through a framework based on rational learning and Bayesian belief updating. Needless to say, it has been challenging but I’ve learned a lot in the process.

Browse the pages to read a more about me and my research interests.